diverse interests, but antagonistic principles. They were but separate steps in one path, and that a road towards national perversion, disgrace, and ruin. The guiding star which once shone in the heavens had been lost, and our statesmen were taking up with a will-o’-the-wisp, born of swamp and miasma, in its place. Although the project was conceived by the South, it could not have been brought to the birth, much less nourished into baneful strength, had it not been adopted by the North in the person of Stephen A. Douglas, one of the ablest leaders of the Democratic party, a member of the United States Senate, and chairman of the Committee upon Territories. Into the bill for organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which he reported to the Senate in January of 1854, he introduced the proposition to repeal the old Missouri Compromise. The mere proposal was regarded as little less than sacrilege. For thirty years that compromise had been looked upon as a sacred pledge, to be held in the same reverence as the Constitution itself. Scarcely four years before, the mover of the proposition for its repeal had described it as “canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.” An attempt to set it aside roused the most intense excitement throughout the whole land, the South in favor, the North opposed. The readiness with which the flame sprang up proved that through these past years of apparent quiet the fire had been covered but not put out. Now that fresh fuel was added and the draught opened, it blazed up more fiercely than ever. It was not confined to any class or condition. All of anti-slavery tendencies saw in it an evidence of the settled purpose of the South to nationalize the institution of slavery, and a testimony that it would not scruple to use any means to attain its end. Moralists saw in it a disregard of most sacred promises, and felt the ground of constitutional fidelity shaking under their feet. More than three thousand clergymen in New England signed a protest against the action proposed. “We protest against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a great moral wrong; as a breach of faith, eminently unjust to the moral principles of the community and subversive of all confidence in national engagements; as a measure full of danger to the peace and even the existence of our beloved Union, and exposing us to the righteous judgments of the Almighty.”